Food Business Success® with Sari Kimbell

Ep #255 Be The Customer To Increase Sales In Every Channel

• Sari Kimbell • Episode 255

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Stop what you are doing foodpreneur - listen to this short episode and then DO this customer journey exercise for your sales channels. You will be amazed at the things that you find that can make all the difference in customers finding you, purchasing from you, and building a long-lasting relationship with your brand. 

Fixing things NOW in the customer experience will make all the difference for your holiday sales online or in person. Want my eyes on your website or other sales channels like markets or wholesale? Book a strategy session and let's make it better so you make more money!

The Sales Channel Challenge is happening LIVE October 21 - 23. This is everything you need to know about selling at farmers markets, online or into stores from licensing to pricing to sales. It's just $27 and comes with a roadmap to launch and grow your business your way. http://foodbizsuccess.com/challenge

Brand new training just dropped 🧨 and it's FREE! Get the three-part video series: 3 Ways to Sell → click here ←

Pick up your copy of the Amazon best selling book 📖 "Key Ingredients" on Amazon here.

Check out my YouTube channel at www.foodbiz.tube for how to videos to start and grow a packaged food business.

When you are ready to make the leap, get the support and accountability you need to create a beautiful business!

Sari  0:00  
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell. I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach, and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in, and food founder journey so you can learn what worked and didn't work and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in. 

Sari  0:47  
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to be here with you today. I actually did a whole other version of the podcast yesterday, and then I just sat with it. I was like, I don't know if that's the right one. And then today I had a Master Your Business group coaching call, and we talked about this topic. And then I had a one on one client call, and I was just like, oh my gosh, I have to share this with the podcast audience and with you all on YouTube, because this activity is going to be so impactful, and can change your season, especially going into the Holidays, which is especially why I was like, I got to share this. Doing this customer journey is going to make a huge impact in your sales. All right, so I just want to jump right into it. So I'm going to keep this one short and sweet. I want to get right to it, and I want to have time for you to go and start doing this, to get into action. Now, the premise of a customer experience, or writing down a customer journey, is pretty simple, right? It's this idea of stepping into the shoes, looking at your different sales channels as if you were a customer shopping, right? But it's actually way harder than it seems to do on your own stuff. So what could be helpful is actually to go first to somebody else's sites, or visit a handful of them and notice what is the customer journey all the way to the end. And doesn't mean you have to go buy something, but you can get a lot of information just snooping around. And it was so funny, because I was telling Master Your Business group that this morning, it just happened that I did this, I am in the market looking for a new coach, and I want some specific attributes from this coach. And so I was on the Life Coach School where I got certified. I was on their website, and I did some search criteria, and then the people that it pulled up, I went to their websites, and I was having completely different experiences on these six people's websites. And in fact, one of the websites didn't work at all. It was just a blank page, so they might not even be in business. One of the websites I got all the way I finally found, like, where to book a call, and then the link was broken. It took me to like a non existent page. And as consumers, we are not that patient. We have been poorly trained, in my opinion, by Amazon and thinking that we can just like, buy now and click now. And like, everything should be immediate, so our patience is pretty low as consumers. And so if something doesn't work, unless we are really committed, like, there's something really interesting about this, we're going to give up. And so with some of these, I just was like, well, that link didn't work. Okay, on to the next one. And it was just so interesting to see all the different ways that they were presenting themselves, and kind of looking at their websites and like, what's working here? What's not? Do I feel like I'm in the right place, like I found the right room, and all of those questions that were going through my mind. So it was such a perfect example to bring into our call. The idea is that you can do this too, right? You could go shop other people's product websites, and you don't have to buy anything, but you can, like, go through the process of like, okay, I've arrived. How do I feel when I'm looking at their website? Am I inspired to keep going? Do I feel like I'm found the right thing? Do I, you know? Can I shop easily? Does this make sense? Am I confused? Is this hard? Where is there friction, right? This is the UX, the user experience, especially online. It can be really challenging and unforgiving. The idea is that if you sell online, you could start there, because that's a great place to start and a really good to get yourself prepared for the holiday season. But this is good for all of your sales channels, and so this would also be farmers markets or any in person events. This would be selling to wholesale accounts, and this could be any number of other sales channels that are smaller or other ones that you do have. 

Sari  5:25  
So the way that Michael Gerber breaks it up is to look at your customer journey or experience like before they ever purchase. So we'll just take the website example, because I'm sure many of you have ecommerce websites. So you would go like, how do people get there, right? How do they even arrive? Do they click on an email from you? Do they find you through Google search? Do they find you through an event that you did? How are they getting to your website? And then when they get there, what is their experience? It can be really difficult to look at your own work, and so I made the suggestion of, you could use somebody in your household. You could ask friends, you could ask maybe even strangers. You could even ask customers to help give you feedback, because as much as possible, you're so close to it. So if you're not able to distance yourself, go seek help, and you could come do a strategy. Call with me, and I will give you lots of feedback on your website, as I love to do.

Sari  6:33  
So you want to really look at it through this neutral lens, as if I was a customer landing on my own website, and then go through the journey like, do I feel like I've landed in the right place? Does this feel welcoming? Am I inspired? You know, does this make sense for the layout? Is the shopping easy? Do I understand what I'm getting? Where are the questions? And I promise you that there are things that are going unanswered on your website that if you asked other people and said, where are you confused? What questions do you have? Like getting those into the product descriptions and really helping to fill that out is going to make for a more pleasant shopping experience. And hopefully avoid some of that friction that leads to abandoned carts or just people clicking off your website and being like, okay, on to the next one. So there's everything that leads up to the sale, then there's the actual purchase. When they're on the product description page, does it make sense? Is it clear? They hit purchase, go through that process. What is that like? Does that all make sense? Is it in your branding and your colors, and is it how you want it to look? So much of the time we set all this stuff up and then we don't actually go and look at it and say, oh, whoops, that's somebody else's brand or logo or some or just the default things that Shopify had in there. So you want to take it all the way through and then go make a test purchase on your own website. So there's everything up to the purchase, okay? So that's like, I made a purchase. What happens? And then there's the post purchase follow up, right? So we were doing this with one of our Master Your Business members, and she was like, okay, you make the purchase, then you're going to get initial email confirmation that says success. You know, you've made this purchase, then you're and it's going to say you will receive a second email confirmation when this order is shipped, and you'll receive a tracking link. And so then you get the second email, and then there's a third email that says that it's been delivered. Now all of that is automated, but always a good idea to review it and see if there's anywhere that you want to make some customization or some tweaks or make sure it all makes sense. Then she ended there, and I was like, well, what about the follow up? There's still more. Like, once a customer receives your order, that's not the end, right? How do we continue the relationship? Are you asking for a review? Is there, like a survey you want to send, is there a follow up "thank you", or here's how to use it, or here's our recipe guide. And then, of course, getting on the regular email list so that they continue to receive your emails. So you want to think about it as if you were the customer. And does it all flow? Does it all make sense, right? And you can do this again for in person, so you would do that exact same thing. What does a customer see when they're walking up to your booth? Go out and look at it. I can't tell you, you know, because I own a farmer's market. I go to farmers market events. When people set up, they're setting up when no one's there, and then it has lots of people. And is your signage still visible, right? Like, where is it? Is it readable from what kind of a distance? How are you attracting people in your booth? So you would go through that same like, what's the pre purchase? What's the purchase experience, and then what's the post purchase experience? 

Sari  10:26  
So go through all of that same with your wholesale buyers, right? So you can do that exact same thing. That's just part one, and I will leave it there, because really, if you just go and do that work, and you go test your links, and you go make some decisions about layout on your website and like that doesn't really flow, I'll tell you. Actually, both the people that we did on the group call and then my one on one coaching call, there were some things that I was like, I don't feel like I know where I'm at as your customer, I don't know that I've landed in the right place. I feel like I want to know a little bit more. And there were some suggestions that I made. We also made some suggestions about, like, different photos, or where to move the products, and just small tweaks that were like this could have a huge impact on sales, right? There's a lot of pricing psychology and a lot of ecommerce psychology that I personally have studied, and we talk about it in the Holiday Ready boot camp. So there's some really cool stuff out there that just making some small shifts could make a really big impact. Plus, we want to catch all those little things, like, does my email pop up work when I actually put an email in? Does that actually work? Do I actually get the discount code, or does that actually start the email flow series? We want to test all these things, and I like to do this at least seasonally, like you could do this every quarter, and you might want to think about, how do I want to shift the language on my website, especially if you're going more towards holidays, to be about gifting, to be about that holiday, right? To maybe shift your messaging a little bit. Listen, your website is not a statue, right? It needs to continue to evolve, it needs to grow, it needs to change. And it's just so good to look at everything with fresh eyes again and say, does this all work? Is everything still connected? Because things break all the time, especially on websites, I will tell you what. So those are your marching orders. Go and make time for this. It is so crucial to do it now. We're just in Q4 and if you are focusing on Holiday sales, and even if you're not doing specifically Holiday stuff, people are in a more buying mood, or they will be. And you want to be sure that things actually work, and that your website or your in person event process, or your wholesale pitches, and the follow up that things are all working, that it all makes sense. 

Sari  13:11  
And ultimately, the second step, which we're not going to get into today, but the second step, is creating processes that are repeatable, checklists and SOPs, so that you could actually turn that over to someone else, and you don't have to continue to do everything in your business. And that's exactly what we do in Master Your Business is creating a foundation of a business so that you are ready to scale and build on top of that, and it doesn't require even more energy from you, but it actually gets simpler as you put into place more systems and processes. All right, that's what I have for you today. Really important work as a food founder, to go and evaluate your sales channels, be a customer. Look at it through a customer's eyes, go and find these places where you can make fixes for things that aren't working and level up to have bigger impact on your sales. Until next time, have an amazing week. 

Sari  14:14  
The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done, you can work with me in two ways. Get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching, or join Food Business Success, which includes membership inside Fuel our community of food business founders, that includes monthly live group coaching calls and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out, and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizuccess.com to start your journey towards your own food business success.